The page has no meta description
Without a meta description, Google writes its own snippet from your page content. Here is what it picks and why you usually want to choose instead.
What you are seeing: Your search results show a sentence you did not write — sometimes a nav label, a cookie notice, or text pulled from the middle of the page.
Google will write one for you
A missing meta description does not leave the snippet blank. Google generates one by pulling text from the page that appears to match the query. When the page has a clear opening paragraph, the result is often reasonable.
When it does not, the snippet can be a fragment of navigation, a cookie banner, boilerplate from a shared template, or a sentence from halfway down the page with no context. You have no control over which, and it can change between queries.
It is not a ranking factor, and it still matters
Google has been explicit that meta description is not used for ranking. That is often misread as meaning it does not matter. It affects click-through rate on a result you have already earned, which is the part of search you have most direct control over.
Terms matching the query are bolded in the snippet, so a description that naturally includes the language people search for gets visibly highlighted in results.
What to write
One or two sentences, up to about 160 characters, describing what the reader gets from the page. Write for someone who has typed a query and is scanning several results for the best match — be specific rather than promotional.
Every page needs its own. A site-wide description repeated across hundreds of pages is close to useless, and Google will usually ignore it and generate its own anyway.
Frequently asked
Does a meta description help my rankings?
No. Google has confirmed it is not a ranking factor. It affects whether someone clicks the result you already rank for, which is worth getting right for a different reason.
Why is Google ignoring the description I wrote?
Google overrides descriptions it judges a poor match for the specific query — commonly when the description is very short, duplicated across many pages, keyword-stuffed, or unrelated to the actual content. A specific, page-level description written in plain language is used far more often.
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